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A fully quantitative approach to high-resolution transmission electron microscopy requires a satisfactory match between image simulations and experiments. While almost perfect agreement between simulations and experiments is routinely achieved on a relative contrast level, a huge mutual discrepancy in the absolute image contrast by a factor of 3 has been frequently reported.

It is shown that a major reason for this well-known contrast discrepancy, which is often called Stobbs-factor problem, lies in the neglect of the detector modulation-transfer function in image simulations. The existence of a general contrast mismatch problem of remarkable size in HRTEM cannot be confirmed. On the contrary, an almost perfect consistency between simulation and experiment is found when including the correct detector MTF in image simulations.